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What I Built on My Birthday (Instead of Celebrating It at midnight)

I used to celebrate by pushing my physical limits at a pub; this year, I celebrated by pushing my cognitive limits in a terminal. A few years ago, I would have spent tonight at a rooftop lounge somewhere in Kolkata. Loud music, too many people, lots of drinks and food, and the kind of high-octane celebration where you get intoxicated far beyond reasonable limits. Birthdays meant midnight parties, groups, and groups meant noise, and noise meant you didn’t have to sit with your

the physics of delivery

Samrat Biswas

Feb 1614 min read

The Gyan-Giver's Confession: How Ops Leaders Take Strategic Tech Debt

Or: How I Spent a Decade Teaching 200 Engineers to Never Do What I Did on My Birthday There is a particular species of hypocrisy that only operations leaders can achieve. It requires years of training. You must first spend a decade reviewing other people's code, shaking your head slowly at pull requests, and delivering sermons on modularity, security, and “doing it right the first time.” You must build a reputation. Your team of 200 must associate your teams handle with phras

Atomic Decomposition

Samrat Biswas

Feb 167 min read

Evermore

Evermore. There were years I built in silence, in rooms no one walked into, where the only voice was the one that said, Stop. This goes nowhere. You know this. I know that voice. You do too. It shows up after the third rejection, the failed launch, the pitch that went silent, the friend who stopped calling back. It sounds reasonable. It sounds like wisdom. Cut your losses. Be realistic. Enough. And some nights I believed it. Sat with it like an old guest who'd overstayed but

Samrat Biswas

Jan 111 min read

Upstream... Seeing Structure Where Others See Chaos

Seeing Structure, Sitting Alone When new projects came in with messy requirements, vague ambitions, half-formed ideas - my mind would automatically start pulling them apart. Not aggressively, not to simplify them away, but to understand what actually needed to exist for the thing to work. I never named this process. I never formalised it. It wasn’t something I learned from a book or a framework. It was just how I learned to survive delivery. Only much later did I realise tha

the physics of delivery

Samrat Biswas

Jan 85 min read

VL-JEPA: From Mimicking Language to Modeling Meaning

31st December 2025, Samrat Biswas (SamB) Every once in a while, something makes us step back and rethink assumptions we didn't know we had. This week, for me, it was a fascinating research paper and a question: how did we arrive here with AI? First, we taught machines to recognize patterns of various complexity and match. Then to generate text. Then images. Then video. Each step felt like the ceiling, until it wasn’t. But somewhere along the way, we settled into a rhythm: p

AI & Tech

Samrat Biswas

Jan 47 min read